Archive for 2019
April 8, 2019
KAROL MARKOWICZ: Don’t buy the attacks on Trump’s Fed picks. Well, they were going to say pretty much the same thing about anyone he picked, because that’s the way things work now.
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait similarly called Cain “an unqualified hack.” Chait, like Krugman, does this to every Republican. In 2003, he wrote a piece for The New Republic that began: “I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.”
Cain and Moore, in other words, shouldn’t have expected fair treatment from the mainstream media. Yet both men have the right experience for the Fed seats to which they are likely to be nominated.
Start with Cain, whose US Senate campaign I worked on in 2004 and who has extensive experience in economics and finance.
From 1995 to 1997, he served as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, having served as deputy chairman for two years before that.
If that’s not relevant experience, what’s the point of the Regional Bank Boards?
As for Stephen Moore, he has worked as an economist at both the conservative Heritage Foundation and the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. He has also served as an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal and occasionally contributes to these pages.
It’s rich to hear people like Paul Krugman and Jonathan Chait calling people unqualified hacks.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Nielsen down and much, much more. “Nielsen was set to meet with Trump at the WH yesterday to talk about the border crisis at 5pm but the conversation turned into a chat about her future. A ‘source’ said that Trump held Nielsen responsible for many of the troubles at the border which ‘led to intense clashes, angry phone calls, and frustration between her and the president’.”
I don’t trust these single, anonymous source reports — but the border is a mess.
RASMUSSEN: Voters Are More Suspicious Now of Clinton Collusion. “A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 47% of Likely U.S. Voters think Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign is more likely than President Trump’s to have illegally colluded with foreign operatives.”
FORMER PRESIDENT ME-ME-ME: Obama shatters previous record, mentions himself 467 times in one speech in Berlin.
Here’s the breakdown of his personal pronoun use (based on a rush transcript of the event):
“I” — 312
“Me” — 33
“My” — 43
“I’d” — 9
“I’m” — 61
“Myself” — 9
The former president’s comments began on his favorite topic: himself.
“It’s been over ten years since I spoke to a slightly larger crowd in front of the Victory Column when I was running for president,” Obama said to a notably quiet crowd. “I had a little less gray hair then. And since then I’ve been back to Germany I think at least ten times. I’ve been to Europe countless times. But I’m as excited to be here with you as I have been ever when I’ve come to Europe.”
At the link there’s a video fast-cut of all 467 instances, and while fast, it still runs for over four-and-a-half minutes.
SALENA ZITO: Western Pennsylvania’s lessons: Run on real issues, not for Green fantasies.
“When I was knocking on doors people told me, ‘We want our roads taken care of. We want our public schools funded.’ And they were sick and tired of hearing national messages. We want the way it’s supposed to be from the bottom up, and that will be our message forever,” he said.
Kelly is in the catbird seat as the president of the labor council in one of the best economies he said the region has seen since the heady days of the steel industry. “That is largely on the backs of the energy industry and construction,” he said.
Last week the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry issued a report showing the Pittsburgh jobless rate hit 3.6%, the lowest since the beginning of the ’70s when steel was king and Terry Bradshaw was the starting quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers.Nearly half of them were in construction and you don’t have to look any further than the massive ethane cracker plant under construction in nearby Monaca to tell the story of the remarkable transformation this area has undergone for union families.
“Five years ago Monaca was a snapshot of everything Western Pennsylvania had lost,” he said of the Beaver County borough that was once the home of manufacturers who produced everything from iron, steel wire, glass, tile, and tubing.
“We lost our industry — not just part of it, we literally lost everything. And when you lose your main base of employment, you lose your main base of taxes, which funds our public schools, our roads, our waterways, our ability to invest in our infrastructure. That goes with everything, your health department, everything that comes of that nature,” he said.
Today it is a bustling construction site filled with scores of massive towering cranes, thanks to Shell’s decision to build a multimillion ethane cracker plant there, a construction project that is estimated to employ more than 10,000 over the next 10 years, with talks of an additional ethane hub to be located nearby as well.
“Now you look at it and it is breeding life. It is breeding a new generation of people that get to stay and live and bring up their families in Western Pennsylvania,” he said with pride.
But if the national Democrats pick a candidate who deeply supports the Green New Deal, Kelly said all of the hard work they have done locally to flip the red region to blue won’t matter.
Stay tuned.
SEE THE ANTISEMITISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Labour’s hate files expose Jeremy Corbyn’s anti‑semite army. “A hard drive of emails and a confidential database last updated on March 8 reveal how the party’s system for dealing with such complaints is bedevilled by delays, inaction and interference from the leader’s office. They reveal members investigated for posting such online comments as ‘Heil Hitler’, ‘F*** the Jews’ and ‘Jews are the problem’ have not been expelled, even though the party received the complaints a year ago.”
Video at the link.
YES, YOU CAN BE TRIED TWICE FOR THE SAME CRIME: Despite the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Constitution, the federal government retains the right to try a person for a federal crime even after a full acquittal based on the same facts in state court (and vice versa). It’s called the dual sovereignty rule. Back when the federal criminal code covered very little, it was a minor footnote to the law. These days, with a federal crime for practically every state crime, it’s a two-bites-at-the-apple rule.
In doing some research for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last week, I noticed that charges had been filed by both federal and state authorities in all the high-profile hate crimes cases I was looking at. I worried this sort of thing would happen back in 2009 when Congress was set to adopt the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. In the Pittsburgh synagogue case, there was even some turf fighting over it. These cases are real plums for ambitious prosecutors.
Sooner or later, somebody will be acquitted for good reason. Nevertheless, there will be an outcry for a re-prosecution. Indeed, this happened in the Trayvon Martin case. Fortunately for George Zimmerman the flesh wounds on the back of his head lent a lot of credibility to his claim of self-defense, so the federal authorities decided not to proceed. It makes me very nervous to think that in politically charged cases an accused will have to prove himself innocent twice (and may not always be as lucky as Zimmerman).
Of course, for many of the law’s supporters, the two-bites-at-apple aspect of the law is not a bug but its most important feature.
AND WRECKING DEMOCRATIC NORMS REQUIRES UNDERMINING FREE SPEECH, WHICH IS WHY THE LEFT IS DOING THAT: Peter Berkowitz: Defending Democratic Norms Requires Defending Free Speech.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON #THERESISTANCE: All The Progressive Plotters. “Are such efforts in the future to be institutionalized? Will the Left nod and keep still, if Republicans attempt to remove an elected Democratic President before his tenure is up? Are appeals to impeachment, the 25th Amendment, the Emoluments Clause, the Logan Act, and a Special Counsel the now normal cargo of political opposition to any future elected president? Is it now permissible in 2020 for Trump’s FBI director to insert an informant into the campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee?”
Of course not. Those things are scandalous and a threat to democracy and the Constitution, when Republicans do them.
Plus: “America over the last half century had been nursed on the dogma that the Left was the guarantor of civil liberties. That was the old message of the battles supposedly waged on our behalf by the ACLU, the free-speech areas on campuses, and the Earl Warren Court. Not now. The left believes that almost any means necessary, extra-legal and anti-constitutional or not, are justified to achieve their noble ends.”
JOEL KOTKIN: IPOs, the Opium of California.
The current frenzy of new IPOs — Uber, Lyft, Slack, Postmates, Pinterest and Airbnb — seems destined to reinforce progressive notions that California represents the future not just for the state, but the nation. It will certainly reinforce California’s fiscal dependency on tech-dominated elites — half of the state’s income taxes come from people making over $500,000 a year — and provide a huge potential multi-billion dollar windfall for the state treasury.
To be sure, the insiders — founders, with nearly half the voting shares in companies such as Lyft, a small “tech mafia” of venture firms, foreign investors such as Japan’s Softbank and Wall Street investors — will have reason to celebrate. But the lavish paydays will do little to relieve, and may even serve to worsen, the state’s gaping inequality and nation-leading poverty rates.
Most damaging of all, the IPO high will encourage supporters of the state’s policy agenda. If new companies crop up, and the handful of politically savvy investors thrive, California’s illuminati can fend off criticism of policies that undermine the middle and working class in everything from energy to housing.
Sort of like the effect of oil in badly run Third World countries.
COUNT EVERY VOTE, THE GOOD ONES TWICE: Turkey’s ruling party seeks vote recount after setback for Erdogan.
In the March 31 local elections, the opposition not only prevailed in a tight race in Istanbul, a city of 15 million residents that is Turkey’s financial and cultural center, but took control of Ankara, the capital. Erdogan’s party, which had held both cities for decades, contested the results, claiming the elections were “tainted.”
The ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, won the right for a recount of votes that were previously deemed invalid. But on Sunday, Ali Ihsan Yavuz, a deputy chairman, said the party would appeal to the country’s top election authority for a total recount of votes in 38 districts in Istanbul, not just of ballots that were canceled.
The party made the move after the opposition candidate’s lead narrowed to 16,380 votes after some 80% of the invalidated ballots were reassessed in the partial recount.
The opposition Republican People’s Party maintains that it looks increasingly unlikely that the invalidated ballots will swing the result in Istanbul in favor of the ruling party.
Ekrem Imamoglu, the opposition party candidate, urged the AKP to concede.
Erdogan would be wise to tread carefully on the election results from Turkey’s two most important cities, but do you really expect him to be?
VICTORY GIRLS: Censorship Wars Using Jargon. “Does anyone remember the appearance of poor little rich alien, Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress in two marathon sessions almost a year ago? One did not envy him. It was a pile on from both the left and the right, and at one point Zuckerberg actually asked Congress to regulate him, especially when it came to politics. The attitude he displayed when asking for regulation was almost crawling and strikingly similar to Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey’s appearance on the Joe Rogan show on March 5th of this year. For three hours, Dorsey was attacked by leftie journalist Tim Pool principally on the censoring of conservatives, compared to the almost-no-censoring of liberals.”
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Ted Cruz Threatens Lawsuit After Yale Law School Blacklists Christian Firms.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: You never hear the one that gets you.
Our expectations of the future are set by the past. When Stephen Hawking died in 2018 his final warning to humanity was to beware artificial intelligence, climate change and a meteor strike from outer space. Although these are now familiar terms no newspaper editor before 1970 would have heard of them. Until the early 1980s global warming fears did not exist: it was global cooling the press warned about. The now familiar dinosaur killing Chicxulub impact crater was only found in 1978 by “geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo … as part of an airborne magnetic survey of the Gulf of Mexico north of the Yucatán peninsula”. Fears of runaway AI only became mainstream in the 21st century. None of these fears are more than 40 years old.
If Stephen Hawking time traveled to whisper his final warning to Albert Einstein the 20th century genius would probably not have had a clue what the 21st century physicist was talking about. . . .
Maybe governments shouldn’t embark on 50 year plans given the revelatory power of new information. While people can’t help but express the future in terms of the past it is more than likely that politicians who embark on huge programs based on multi decade predictions will be sorely disappointed. It’s entirely probable we’ve never even heard of whatever will worry the world of 2080. Tomorrow, like the Russian sky, is full of surprises.
That Chinese one-child policy hasn’t worked out so well.
SOME SAY IT’S THE KEY TO SUCCESS. ALMOST CERTAINLY THE KEY TO HAPPINESS: Delighting in What You Do.
WELL… IT DOES AFFECT THEIR BUSINESS: Amsterdam sex workers angry at red light district tours ban.
DR. HAWKING COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Stephen Hawking’s theory of dark matter debunked: scientists.
THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: NY Times, Washington Post are still disgracefully enabling ‘Collusion Delusion’.
WAY TO KEEP IT CLASSY: Hillary Clinton Aide Mocks Mitch McConnell For Childhood Polio Injury.
NO. SHE’S AN IDIOT. ALSO MAL-EDUCATED. OH, AND ILL BRED. OTHER THAN THAT, I’M SURE SHE’S FINE: Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Ok?